I don't usually write about my personal life, but I needed to share these words... Someone very special to me died today. You know how people say, "She got her smarts from her uncle." or "She got her artistic ability from her grandmother." or "She got her beautiful singing voice from her second cousin." Well, I got my passion for history from my Aunt Pat. Sure, I have plenty of relatives who love history--but Aunt Pat preferred to hold history and touch history. Her love for the past went beyond reading books--though she did love reading books. You see, Aunt Pat accumulated history--in...

We had a rough week. While my kids suffered through a nasty stomach bug, I suffered through the final days of Comm 101. The good news is, I survived the class--the same class I'd been putting off since I started working towards my Associates Degree in 2008. The topic of my speeches, you ask? Well, metal detecting, of course: http://www.youtube.com/embed?listType=playlist&list=UU9D3lVCpT6kljc61gm6h_Yg So in the midst of completing my final assignments, I fell into the role of Dr. Mom--cuddling on the couch, watching a million-and-one episodes of Sesame Street, and cleaning partially digested...

It happened today. I was at church, watching my children skip across the rows of sanctuary chairs like circus acrobats--when a visitor posed the question, "You're that metal detecting girl, right?" I must have blushed ten shades of red. Had he been a regular at our church, I probably wouldn't have been so flattered--but he was just visiting for a baby dedication that morning. He recognized me from my blog! I asked if he metal detected--nope, he just followed my blog. Needless to say, this stranger made my day--perhaps even my month... dare I say year? This must qualify for celebrity status?...

I vividly recall the moment when I turned in my Makro Racer for the Summer. As a matter of fact, I caught that moment on video for your viewing pleasure: [embedyt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rLTX46_Jxg[/embedyt] I'm pretty sure I almost passed out from heat exhaustion that day, but anyone who digs with me knows that I'm a bit relentless. You haven't heard from me in a while. I've been laying low this Summer--fixing up the house, enjoying time with the kiddos, chugging through an online course, and focusing on my big-kid obligations. But the truth is, I miss sharing my relic hunting...

I've been out of commission this past month--taking a much-dreaded speech course in pursuit of my associates degree, remodeling our house with new floors and fresh paint, and chasing after two hellions--one who recently learned the word NO and the other who has it mastered. That being said, I haven't had much opportunity to fire up my new Makro Racer. I'm hoping that once this heat dissipates and I put the public speaking torture to rest, I'll find some time to hit my newest permission--an abandoned house in the woods that was once the Fickel House. Now, from creeping around in the detecting...

Even before I started metal detecting, I'd always had a weakness for old homes--the crumbling stone facades, the weathered brick, and paint-peeled clapboards. These properties--with their overgrown vegetation, collapsing outbuildings, and crooked shutters--possess some sort of decrepit beauty that I've always found to be both haunting and mesmerizing. I think sometimes we forget that these sad structures were once the pride of a family name, a booming industry, a community, or a righteous cause. Now, they stand in ruin and waste away to the tune of the passing decades... until someone like...

I'll admit that I've been on a glass kick lately. Obviously, not a single one of my detectors can find glass--but I've mastered a method for finding bottle shards and china fragments. Are you ready for this? I call it... the random-hole-digging-method. You may be asking yourself, what is this random-hole-digging-method and how can I sign up. Well, I'm about to tell you... Sometime last week, I decided to leave the detector in the trunk of my Forester. Instead, I grabbed my shovel and set off to find myself a bottle dump or privy. For those of you who follow my blog, this is the brick house...

A few days after I graduated first grade, my parents uprooted our entire family and moved us out West. I traded clam chowdAH for barbecue, rolling waves for endless plains, and soda for pop. The cultural whiplash took awhile to recover from, but once I realized ya'll was essentially the same as youz-guys--I got along just fine. While living in Kansas, I remember going on lots of fields trips--this was back before schools had to worry about all that liability. Heck, all you needed was a signed permission slip and you could feed tigers at the zoo or take an inflatable raft down some wicked...

Every now and then, you knock on a stranger's door hoping to obtain a permission and you get a surprising response--sometimes its a face full of front door, sometimes its a explosion of profanity, and sometimes its the business end of a twelve gauge and a strong verbal warning to skedaddle. Then, sometimes... its a tour of the one room school house, a complete history of the area, and free rein of the hundred-and-fifty acre property. Sometime last Fall, I turned down a country road in search of a rumored property. I snaked my way through the orchards, the cornfields, and the pastures of...

I talk to dead people. Now--hang on a second--before you call the loony bin and have me committed, you should hear me out... I talk to dead people, but the dead people don't always talk back. I mean, sometimes they do. Sometimes they give me a nudge in the right direction. Sometimes they whisper through a gust of wind. Sometimes they manifest as a crow perched in tree--constantly heckling and shouting commands. Granted, this is usually when I'm all by myself at some abandoned homestead--with no one to confirm the phenomena--but I assure you that I'm not making this stuff up. Yesterday was a horrible...